Compiled by John A. Speyrer


"I strongly doubt the capacity of the child to ever consciously or awarefully have the realization that his parents do not really love him when he is being his real self. Such a realization presupposes a level of cognition and higher synthesis, even within the precognitive, feeling-centered sphere, which far surpasses the intuitive capacities of the infant or young child."9

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"...to label a new brand of abreaction as unique is akin to putting a new toothpaste on the market."4

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"...when patients cry over events from their infancy, they are merely symbolizing more recent pains, in the same way as people who cry at the movies."1

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"The therapist...makes considerable effort to work the patient into a fevered state of emotionality. In this state, the idea that suffering derives from hitherto strangled screams can be implanted with effect. After reaching a pitch of emotional excitement, the participant is enjoined to yell his head off. Ostensibly, this produces relief."5

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"Janov's claims are obvious scientific hyperbole."7

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"Janov is awfully good at taking people apart," says a critic, "but not so good at putting them together."3

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"...Primal patients are modern hysterics who are undergoing an emotional catharsis---a technique which psychiatric history has shown not to be curative."7

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"It seemed to me that a susceptibility to psychic sensationalism and a simultaneous failure to acknowledge deceptions was a crucial problem of Primal Theory."2

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"...Primal patients often engage in convulsive thrashing, wailing, and screaming, reactions that seem less the spontaneous release of feeling than desperate attempts to do what the theory says is necessary."1

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"It is widely understood by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts that a trauma does not remain sequestered in the past, like a piece of baggage left in a bus station locker."2

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Los Angeles Psychoanalyst, Joel Shor: "I see Janov's work as malignant regression. Regression can be benign, but Janov fails to provide an adequate relationship in which a person can feel safe."3

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"...At a VA hospital during World War II ... a soldier, under the influence of sodium pentothol, acted out the entire battle of Iwo Jima on the ward floor. Only later was it discovered that he had never left the continental United States."2

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"Scripture talks hardly at all about feelings; much greater concern is placed on righteous behavior, holiness, spiritual truth, and a personal relationship with the Lord."6

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"The traumas of childhood...tend to coalesce, the most recent one absorbing the previous ones so that there is as much chance of recovering or reliving some original Primal experience as there is of recovering in pure form from a white sauce the butter, flour, or milk of which it was blended."2

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"The therapist tends to orchestrate the feelings of patients to confirm to theory."1

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"A primal may..."well be a fantasy or partial fantasy mixed up with a lot of present needs and wishes---one element in a system of meanings, not necessarily an actual event."2

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"With dammed-up impulses and pain pushing on various brain structures, one is uncertain whether to call a plumber, an electrician, or a brain surgeon."4

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"This therapy (primal) is determined to subject the parents of clients to the most vicious kind of character assassination."10

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"The point to be emphasized here is that what Janov calls Primal Pains and Primal Memories have no intrinsic substance or existence within themselves."9

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"Janov's theory is neither proved nor completely disproved by the experience of his clients."2

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Primal therapy "...is based on the implausible assumption that most psychological dysfunction is a result of stymied screams of protest and frustration that should have occurred in infancy."5

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"...Primal Therapy, while contending that it is anti-authoritarian by being anti-intellectual about psychology, is tyrannical on an emotional level. Patients are made to feel that they rarely know what they are up to in the present by therapists eager to anchor all of a patient's utterances securely in the infantile past".2

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"...it seems ...likely that the emotions expressed during primal scenes represent adult frustrations, or the affective component of the adult's thoughts about the sadness of the child."1

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"But how can one be sure whether a patient was in that Primal place or just doing a good hysterical imitation of being there?"2

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"The scientificity of...primal...research is dubious, since changes in vital signs---blood pressure, core body temperature, EEG, EKG---can be responses to any number of phenomena..."2

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"Given the primal therapist's convictions about the inevitably of parental betrayal, therapy merely focuses on finding the proper detail to verify these a priori assumptions."10

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"Some critics have suggested that patients scream because they are expected to."3

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"Basically his critics say (1) that abreaction is not truly curative,(2) that Primal Therapy is early disproven Freud all over again, (3) that the Primal regression to childhood is possibly dangerous, (4) that many Primals are faked."7

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"A...very troubling aspect of the therapy is its neo-infantilism. It purports to remove from the therapeutic process what certain critics find most threatening about traditional psychotherapy--the therapist's arrogating to himself the interpretive power to tell a patient what he might be feeling..."2

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"There is no possibility that the patient truly remembers his crib experiences."7

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"Perhaps primal therapy does change clients in dramatic ways. Whether the change is in a healthy direction is open to question."8

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Primal Therapy's "...fixation on a total cure, and the mythology of the post-Primal person led it away from a careful diagnosis of individual problems and the idea of therapeutic compromise to a sometimes naive, simplistic belief in its own omnipotence. In a sense, Primal Therapy was guilty of narcissism on an institutional scale."2

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1Catharsis in Psychotherapy, Michael P. Nichols and Melvin Zax
2Psychobabble, R. D. Rosen
3"People Weekly," May 19, 1978
4"Psychology Today," December 1976, The Primal Therapy Trip -- Medicine or Religion, E. Fuller Torrey
5Mind, Mood & Medicine, Paul Wender & Donald Klein
6You Aren't What You Feel, Greg Gavrilides, New Covenant Magazine
7The Psychological Society, Martin L. Gross
8An Anatomy of the Primal Revolution, Walter Kaufmann, J. Humanistic Psychology
9The New Body Psychotherapies, Malcolm Brown
10Beware the Talking Cure, Terence W. Campbell